Achenbach, Andreas

1815 Kassel &dash; 1910 Düsseldorf

Information about the artist

Andreas Achenbach, alongside with his younger brother Oswald, is one of the outstanding phenomena in the European landscape painting of the 19th century.
At the age of 12 he became a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Only four years later he succeeded with "View of the Old Academy Building" a sensational early work, with which he gained a reputation as a genius.
This superb first work is the beginning of a seven-decade-long creative process that began with Norwegian landscapes and continued with famous marine subjects and landscapes of Westphalia.
The technical and compositional perfection of his works called for a comparison with the most famous landscape painters in the history of art: "He is in a way, that hardly any other artist was, not Claude Lorrain neither Ruysdael , ruler over land and sea..." remarked the magazine "Dioscuri" 1861.